Awards and Recognitions

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Whew! I went through over two hundred emails that have been accumulating throughout my vacation and illness and I'm glad to say that I am caught up! I don't usually let myself get this behind--at least not for my Fantasy Debut email address. I'll never have time to organize my personal inbox. Among the emails I unearthed was a particularly embarassing one that required me to send an apology to an author . . . but the least said about that, the better.

I'm afraid I've set aside another novel, the title of which I won't mention for now. I need something lighter, or maybe just something else. I tried a few other novels that I have waiting around, and none are lighting my fire. Therefore, I'm heading to the bookstore this weekend. I'll keep my shopping list secret for now, but if I get a chance to snap some photos of some debut novels, I will do so. It has been a long time since I've done that--almost a year!

Has anyone else noticed that Blogger's comment form is downright unfriendly these days? You sit there typing your comment and all of a sudden your text vanishes, the captcha (the text verification thingy) reloads and you have to start from scratch. It has even happened to me on blogs that doesn't have a captcha.

As an aside, might I issue a humble request for those of you who have captchas to turn them off? I have never had a captcha on this blog and I get very little comment spam. My approach--which I somewhat arrogantly hope everyone will emulate--is to wait for a spam problem to happen before I start trying to block it. A year and tens of thousands of visits later, and I'm still waiting.

Anyway, about the comment bug. I briefly turned on a Blogger In Draft comment feature that makes your comment page look more like WordPress's. However, it had issues, so I turned it back off. Therefore, I am going to turn on the feature where the comment form loads in a pop-up window. I have noticed that the pop-up version of the comment form does not seem to have the problem with everything refreshing. If you hate that, please let me know.

I haven't noticed the refresh problem myself. I had the word verification shut off for two separate times in my blog's existence. Both times I ended up getting slammed with spam within about two weeks. Guess you're just lucky.:)

Umm, I guess I'm fated to be the weirdo. First time the cool little popup window, well, popped up, I started typing and poof, it jumped up on me. Sigh.

So, I decided to try again, killed window, reloaded, no more jumping. Sigh.

Well I guess if you reload its cached and it doesn't do that jump up to top of page typing go poof thingie anymore. That or the few choice words I sent its way scared it into behaving. But anyway, thats my story and I'm sticking with it!